


Four Corners of the Sky

by purplekitte



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Multi, Political Alliances, Polyamory, Sedoretu, Spoilers through 3.0, Taboo Relationships, ambiguous WoL, but more a pairwise thing within that, sort of an OT4, this is never explained just no one dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 12:25:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7051342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplekitte/pseuds/purplekitte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The formation of the First Sedoretu of Ishgard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Corners of the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> The [sedoretu](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sedoretu), courtesy of Ursula K. Le Guin

_Morning_

Ser Aymeric is Morning, Ser Lucia is Morning. There could never be anything other than that between them.

There are plenty of nasty rumors about them—a bastard in such high position; an outsider, not even Elezen at that—but there are some insinuations too obscene to speak, for the dignity of their positions and the honor of the speaker if nothing else.

They’ve worked for their positions and if they love them more than each other, well, that’s what they’ve chosen. She gave up everything for him—her country, her mission—and in return he accepted everything that she confessed and gave her a leader worth following. They’ll never put that in jeopardy, never be anything other than perfectly formal and polite with each other. There’s affection there, no one doubts that. Someday they and Estinien will find an Evening woman to complete their sedoretu, and they’ll love each other like Morning siblings like nature intended.

They don’t, but they can pretend.

*

_Evening_

“That should be enough firewood and enough time for the others to set up camp. Shall we get back?”

“No. We should give them some more time.”

“Why?” Alphinaud asked. “Do you think we need more firewood? Remember we’re not in the snows of the highlands anymore. We’re not going to get caught in a blizzard.”

“No.”

“Did you see something dangerous that we should sneak around and not disturb? Did you find a moogle stuck in a tree?”

The Warrior of Light sighed. It should have been really, really obvious the answer was _Because Estinien and Ysayle are surely having sex as we speak; violent, angry sex._

But maybe Alphinaud was as oblivious as he looked. That was often the case with the sheltered boy. Then one thing would lead to another and Alphinaud would have to get the talk about how some people liked those in their own moiety, even if it was taboo and lots of folks would call it wrong. The Warrior wasn’t that way and only flirted with Evening people like Haurchefant, Y’shtola, or Thancred, but an adventurer had to be cosmopolitan and progressive to travel across all of Eorzea. Not everywhere was as traditional as Ishgard.

Alphinaud and Alisaie were just too well suited for each other, as future Evening siblings in a sedoretu as well as blood siblings, for him to have ever considered other Evening people in that context.

“You’re worried they’re fighting as usual and that’s delayed them, and it will be terribly embarrassing for them if we return with our chores done while they, the responsible adults, are behaving like squabbling children.”

The Warrior nodded, relieved. Alphinaud chose to take that as _Exactly right. Good deduction as ever._ No offense to the boy, but that was in keeping with his track record where deductions were concerned.

From the stiff way Ysayle sat at dinner to Estinien’s bruised lips (any other bruises he had hidden), there was little doubt which one of them was right, as far as the adventurer was concerned.

*

_Day_

“I wanted a word, Lady Iceheart, before you disappear with your people.”

“Ser Lucia,” Iceheart nodded in acknowledgment. She must have heard about Lucia from the Warrior and Estinien as someone she could trust, someone willing to go along with their whole conspiracy into the wilderness.

“You have my vow, things are going to change. We will not let what you did or what you learned be silenced. The Dragonsong War is over. Your people and mine will make peace.”

“Your people?”

“I wasn’t born Ishgardian, but neither were you born a heretic.”

“I’ve killed many of yours before, sure I was in the right, as they too were when they killed mine. How does it feel to realize how little any of us know?”

“I’ll settle for knowing those who live in the present, if not the past. Ser Aymeric wants peace and I follow him. The Warrior of Light may just save us all, and I’ll assist as I can. I will forgive you all the deeds of the past, and I know many of them and have hated you over them, for a dawning of peace.”

Lucia didn’t know how heretics usually prayed—to dragons, she’d usually assumed, and not to Halone—but Iceheart, finding compromise, told her, “Hydaelyn’s blessing on you,” before she took her followers away.

*

_Night_

Estinien never looked less than self-satisfied when in Aymeric’s bed, but this really took the cake. A good fraction of the focus he usually put towards wishing revenge on Nidhogg, whatever he was doing momentarily, was now turned on Aymeric. Aymeric also suspected Estinien had spent years fantasizing about fucking him in the pool of blood around the wyrm’s corpse, and was glad he’d merely had to deal with the dragoon’s stained armor in the Holy See rather than the Aery.

“By the way...” Estinien trailed off, not in embarrassment, but for once considering his words so they came out right.

“By the way?” Aymeric repeated, after he stopped panting enough to speak fluently, sweat drying between them, his hands still in Estinien’s white hair.

“I’m not taking up playing politics—let the Leveilleur boy make policy decisions before you try to bring me into the reform plans you’re taking to the Archbishop—but I have one plan.”

“You? A plan? A political plan? Is it a terrible one?”

“Of course it is that. But I’ll work, because it is mine,” he said, smug as ever. “I can be brilliant when I bother to waste my time on such things.”

“And humble.”

“Never that.”

*

_Dawn_

“Commander.”

“Azure Dragoon.”

She and Estinien weren’t close, but she wasn’t accustomed to him being quite so formal. Their personal connections aside, he wasn’t known for being respectful of anyone.

Then she realized: he was hanging back.

“Are you injured?” Lucia asked. She didn’t believe it, and if he had been he would have been ignoring the wound completely, but it was a safe question. _I have no idea what you’re doing but there’s something off about you,_ less so.

“No. I am fit to follow you and your temple knights, lady commander.”

That was it; while she technically did outrank him in the hierarchy of knighthood, the Azure Dragoon was a law of his own. She was a leader, he a loner. Normally he would run off on his own to do something stupid, which was one reason she wasn’t overly fond of him.

“Will you follow, or will you break our formation?”

“I will do whatever it takes to get that idiot out of there alive. That’s not my specialty, however, so I leave it up to you to make the best use of me. You know the trail of slaughter I’ll make of anything in front of me, sure as I’m Evening. But this is a rescue mission, and I won’t jeopardize its chance of success. If we’re too late...”

“I’ll follow your lead then.” She didn’t even want to think of the possibility, but some part of her noted it would be good to have him at her side then. He had had a lifetime to perfect the art of vengeance. That crimson armor would be the most beautiful thing in the world for her then.

“Until then, I place my hopes in you, my lady.”

*

_Dusk_

“To dispense with the pleasantries, my lady, I am here to propose a marriage.”

“The lord commander of Ishgard and the lady of the heretics as an evening marriage. That’s nearly the most unsuitable love story I’ve ever heard, and we all know how the sedoretu between Shiva, Hraesvelgr, Nidhogg, and Ratatoskr worked out.”

“I can’t claim to love you at all, Lady Iceheart,” said Aymeric without hesitation. “I ask you for politics. What I love is my people and what I love is peace, and may that love to be strong enough.”

Ysayle tilted her head, not a nod, not quite. “I have heard many things about you. I don’t know what to make of it all. Someone who sends Estinien as an ambassador, yet sends ambassadors.”

“I did come myself for a reason. He’d muck it up, and I want this on my head. I can’t speak for who I am except through my actions, but I know of you too. I respect you as a commander and acknowledge the authority you hold, even when our forces have been at odds. I believe you desire peace as well, and the restoration of Shiva’s dream of harmony between man and dragon. I know everyone I trust who has known you personally trusts you. Lucia speaks well of you, and Estinien... of all people Estinien. This was his idea first.”

She found herself even more appalled by that than anything else. “We hate each other. Passionately.” Perhaps she’d said too much, but might as well scandalize him now.

Aymeric coughed, hinting he knew perfectly well what was going on there. “We’re total strangers, and if acquaintances in a political alliance is all we ever are, so be it. I don’t care if you cross the bounds of moeity, or lie down with dragons. I was born in sin and am hardly without sin myself. Marry us for love of politics.”

An Ishgardian she could respect. A future she could hope for. A long road of hatred had shaped the lives of every person currently living among her followers or his, and those for fifty generations before, which would lead them to be condemned for this by all.

There were too many words to voice them all in a promise. So she condensed them all into simply, “Yes.”

*

_The Sedoretu_

When they share each other’s beds until morning, it’s the day and night marriages. Aymeric and Estinien can joke with each other, let loose around each other without worrying how it will be taken, keep each other sane. Lucia and Ysayle discover they genuinely like each other, and though their relationship grows slowly, it is deep and solid. They talk long into the night and warm each other under the blankets long before they grow to share another warmth between them.

The evening marriage is the hardest in some ways. Everyone has their eyes on Aymeric and Ysayle. That’s the one they’re truly hated for. That’s the one that represents everything wrong with this brave new world in so many people’s eyes. They put politics and their own people’s interests first, always. But there’s personal respect there, that deepens into admiration and partnership as time goes on. They might be hated, but they have each other. Peace might be sometimes seem impossible and the road to it a mass of contradictions and mutually exclusive needs, but they resolve to make it work.

If the morning marriage isn’t the closest, so be it. Lucia and Estinien discover they like sparring together. They like hurting each other, honestly, but there’s no malice there as surely as there’s no worry holding them back. They don’t have much in common, but they can concentrate on complementing one another instead of stepping on each other’s toes, Lucia solid and present in Ishgard, Estinien disappearing abroad for weeks at a time. He brings her back wildflowers sometimes from distant hillsides, not looking at her as he hands them over, as if she weren’t his wife. She keeps them on her desk.

If there are sins they commit behind closed doors, then they are sins they share and do not speak of. Aymeric and Lucia are discrete. Everyone knows they love each other, just not how. Estinien and Ysayle take their affairs far from prying eyes. They hate each other, that’s certainly true, and people can believe what holds them together is tolerance rather than passion.

It’s complicated and wrong as often as right, but they have each other and peace and life. Is that the most you can hope for from any marriage?


End file.
